ch1n3du reviewed The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies
Part-biography, part-political thriller, The Unaccountability Machine is a rousing exposé of how management failures lead …
Interesting but vague
3 stars
The writing is mostly good, aside from some really really bad analogies. However throughout the book Cybernetics is sold as great tool for managing the complex problems society faces but it's never explained exactly how. Near the end of the book there's the author tries showing the potential of LLMs to improve bureaucracies but it just feels like a worse version of Henry Farrell's article on it: www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-management-singularity.
I left the book feeling very suspicious of cybernetics as a whole, I hope to try picking up a more technical book on Cybernetics to help get a better understanding of how/if it's a useful tool.
